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Inside the Decision To Shut Down Silent Mail
Trailrunner7 writes with this snippet from ThreatPost:: "Silent Circle's decision to shut down its Silent Mail email service may have come quickly yesterday, and the timing of the announcement admittedly was prompted by Lavabit's decision to suspend operations hours before. But the seeds for this decision may have been sown long before Edward Snowden, who reportedly used Lavabit as a secure email provider, was a household name and NSA warrants for customer data were known costs of doing business. ... 'When we saw the Lavabit announcement, the thing we were worrying about had happened, and it had happened to somebody else. It was very difficult to not think I'm next,' Callas said. 'I had been discussing with Phil [founder and PGP developer Phil Zimmerman] over dinner the night before, should we be doing this and what the timing should be. I was looking at it from point that I want to be a responsible service provider and not leave users in a lurch. [The Lavabit announcement] told me I have to start moving on it now.'"
This is called "oppression," when you live in fear of being the "next" target of government "scrutiny."
I don't think there is any money directly attached. It's more of a threatened 'if you don't comply we throw you and your employees in jail' thing. Not sure how that would work out in a real world courtroom (I'd like to assume it would make it to court including a jury), but the companies likely don't want to chance it. Can't say I blame them in this case- it's looking like McCarthyism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mcarthyism) all over again. Sorry for the rusty geek skills.
To reliably do this, they must move themselves and have a self-hosted solution. If you host your data with anyone else you need to believe they value your data more than the money to be made from it or you are worth the head-ache of annoyingly trying to protect it from government agencies.
Over the last 10 years from time to time people within my company (which highly depends on privacy) have suggested hosting our servers/services with external hosting providers/cloud solutions. Every time I refuse. Their arguments are valid. It could be cheaper. It removes the hosting burden. These large providers are experts and could have better security. Even all of that being true the overriding truth as I see it is even though they may be better, cheaper, etc I can promise you we care about our data more than they will. FBI raids a data center for someone elses server and grabs our with it? Sorry, it was the FBIs fault! Any business reality makes handing over our data a legal requirement or just more convenient legally? Sorry we had to!
The last few months revelations just confirm what I've always known. If security and privacy are your business and you take it seriously, you had better be hosting it yourself. Google may have better technical experts than you, but I promise the people who actually make decisions internally care more about your data and will fight for it more when you host internally.
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
There's negligible money in complying with these (illegal) 'requests' fro data. Why spread FUD? If you want to do something about it, fix the damn US government. Personally,I'm still surprised a few of those companies haven't moved to Canada.
Secure email on mobile phones is not going to happen. The host is compromised.
It's not the threat of jail, but the threat that things can start going wrong for any provider that does not play ball with the NSA.
It's like the mafia thugs that come into the restaurant and sell the owner "insurance" because "a lot of bad things can happen, you know?"
There is a very short window of opportunity to stop the Panopticon now. Unfortunately, the people in power have made it clear that nothing in the political process is going to stop them. The solutions, if they come, will be outside of the political process. They made it that way, so people who resist ubiquitous surveillance and surrender of privacy can be seen as "radicals" and "terrorists" and worse.
There are some bad times coming, I fear.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The Constitution is not a suicide pact. There are options between colonoscopy-level-surveillance and nuclear-price-of-feedom.
How do you think tons of drugs from Mexico and Colombia get into the US every day?
The Overlords want you to think that it is all due to corrupt policemen and politicians south of the border, but how does it get in and then gets distributed?
Same answer, corrupt policemen and politicians. But they want the market for themselves, so yes, you try to do it on your own, you're a terrorist!
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey